All-Day Breakfast

by Adam Lewis Schroeder

  “José, he lifted you up there for me,” he smiled. “The others’ll be another half-hour so he’s getting lunch ready.”

  “Are you going to adopt me?” I asked.

  “Oh, no, no. I’m just curious to know what-all you can retain.”

  “José,” I said.

  “That’s the spirit!”

  I had to put my cheek back down on the metal. Sleep was dumping all over me. I was lying beside a woman, in a motel. We had all of our clothes on.

  “Lazybones,” I heard him say.

  Penzler was tapping away at a computer on the desk in front of me. My right foot still had its single heroic toe.

  “Oh, Pete!” Penzler grinned. “Wide awake! See here on the monitor? Let me magnify this. There, see the banana-shaped structures, the purple ones? These are the spindle cells, they run between the higher and lower portions of the brain, connecting abstract thinking with base instincts, you get the idea. I hope. You listening, Pete?”

  His purple shapes really did look like bananas.

  “They connect the top and bottom.”

  “Of what, Pete?”

  “Of the brain.”

  “Correct, good—you could even say the presence of spindle cells separates man from animals. You could say that, except primates and cetaceans have them as well. You cool with all this?”

  Any of my students would’ve agreed he was torturing me to death.

  “But in every Homo zumbi I’ve examined—and, granted, that’s only seven—in every one, the spindle cells have been the first part of the brain to have degenerated.”

  “How…how do you rebuild these, the spindle cells?”

  “Rebuild them? Very pertinent question, you smart bugger. If I knew that I could unhook my daughter from the drip and send her to Tuscany to meet Guidos. But no, Duffy didn’t have the slightest idea, I don’t—nobody knows. Duffy had sideline projects anyway—I don’t want to ride you about him, I was disappointed in his work anyway. I might sound like a heartless bugger if you’re really listening, but from day one it’s all been for my daughters. You can appreciate that.”

  “Are you going to rebuild a spindle cell in, um, the next couple minutes?”

  “Cute. You’re a cute bugger,” he said.

  He rolled back from the desk and darted through the clutter of furniture to Alice’s gurney, where he switched bags and tubes and pulled the blanket back up to her chin. She must’ve been asleep. I wished I had a stuffed animal to lay my head on.

  Then he was back, talking to me while texting somebody else.

  “Now, the military will need to know how to rebuild spindles, of course, since they won the bid for all applications, and since you’re still able to form a sentence at this late date I imagine you’ll be an excellent specimen for us to observe the dissolution from spindle cells on down. It’ll float in a nutrient bath while that happens, of course, and the rest of your nervous system will be wired to a—”

  “I’ll be like George Reid.”

  “George, yes, crafty buggers, the both of you.” He rubbed his thighs. “Interestingly, Subject Two for the third version was a boyfriend of Alice’s who died in a pit behind the barn six days after eating his own feet, and though the rest of his brain looked like vanilla pudding, the little old medulla oblongata was still sitting up like—”

  “Medulla oblongata,” I said.

  “This file is Brad, Alice’s old beau.”

  “Why’d you give the Kuwaiti stuff to him?”

  “Because Natalia was in so much pain, and because Brad was, well, hanging around. I gave him fifteen hundred dollars. It had already worked on Natalia, it’d worked poorly, but I wanted a control. That’s good science. See, like a little mouse crouched under there? In an unaffected person it’s grayish brown like the rest of the brain, but on Brad it’s almost orange, hey? So far the medulla oblongata’s been that orange color in every subject. My best theory is that the resources which would usually preserve the entire brain were shunted into Brad’s medulla oblongata to keep it intact come hell or high water. Isn’t it a useful little article? I could easily synthesize a tree frog around Brad’s hardy little stem now, a tree frog that would lift weights and watch nascar. Another singularity was that his penis became this—”

  “So my medulla oblongata,” I said, “is pumped full of these preservatives.”

  “Presumably. And for Subjects Three through Five I did everything conceivable to get the contents of the previous subject’s medulla into them—injections, unguents, Jesus, I inserted suppositories!”

  He looked to me for some joyous reaction.

  “Did they eat the medulla oblongata?” I asked.

  “Not per se—gee, talking like a zombie now, aren’t you? At any rate, it never took, they kept rotting. So now Subject Six is just stewing. But I mean, what if a subject has some condition that the product can only improve—dyslexia, hip dysplacia? It’s untapped. Might be the best thing that ever happened to them.” He scratched holy hell out of his armpit. “One last thing—you’ll like this. The human body weighs twenty-one grams less in the instant after death than it did before, that’s been measured a thousand times over. So it’s been argued for the last hundred years by certain learned buggers that man’s immortal soul must therefore weigh twenty-one grams, right? But how much weight do you estimate Homo zumbi lose when the last electrical spark has flickered out of your brain, how much?”

  “Fifty-six pounds,” I said. “We take one last dump.”

  “No, you lose no weight at all.” He grinned, showing teeth that could’ve cracked walnuts. “Which means, Pete, that you’ve already lost the twenty-one grams.”

  “Or maybe mine are locked up tight inside my medulla oblongata. Hiding from these damn zombies wandering the countryside.”

  “Still lucid.” He lifted a stopwatch from the table. “Quick, what’s your name?”

  “Peter Giller.”

  “How many children?”

  I could picture them so clearly: a boy and a girl. And one was older than the other, definitely.

  “Two children,” I said.

  “Their names?”

  My image of the two of them blurred like a rainy windshield. I turned my eyes backwards into my head, glimpsed them watching me, holding hands, wearing new running shoes with Velcro straps.

  “Roy,” I announced.

  “You have no child named Roy.”

  “Susan,” I said.

  “No!”

  He set the stopwatch down and started typing. It really was a milestone. I couldn’t even picture them.

  “So you did all this for one of your kids?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes! A father gives his children everything of himself,” he said. “That’s just how the world was meant to be.”

  “This one time,” I said, “I agree with you completely.”

  “Ah, okay,” he said, studying his phone. “José says they’ll be here in ten minutes to cart you off to the bunker for time without end. Won’t that be nice? I already sent our old vhs tapes. Watch Weekend at Bernie’s. And the boys’ll be here with significant numbers and armaments to cart even your ass away, it’s going to be impressive.”

  “Gaaaah!” said the fish tank at his elbow. Mechanical, female, earsplitting, like a talking doll hooked to a truck battery.

  “What was that?” Alice called.

  Penzler rolled his chair back.

  “Gah!” The covering towel jumped an inch.

  “It’s the stupid capuchin monkey,” he called. “Stay over there, Alice!”

  But she was already sitting up on the gurney, unsnapping tubes from her arm. She just wore jeans and a black bra.

  “Gaaar,” the fish tank said. “Ga-har?”

  “Stay where you are!” Penzler called to Alice. “The enzymes fired it up sooner than
I’d wanted!” He rolled between the tables to intercept her. “Not yet, understand?”

  Alice ran around her father’s desk just as Penzler swooped in from the other side, but she reached over him and got her fingers on the corner of the towel.

  “Don’t!” her father yelled.

  She pulled the towel onto the floor, and in the tank we saw Natalia’s head held upright on sparking metal rods. The right side of her face hung gray and slack but the left was turning itself inside out by winking and spitting and gritting its teeth. Blood ran out the corners of its eyes. Penzler gripped the arms of his chair.

  “I’m going to bring her back,” he said calmly.

  Muscles twitched in Alice’s back.

  “That’s not Nat,” she murmured.

  The head lurched its jaw back and forth, gagging, the eye still winking, until it shifted on the rods and thumped sideways against the glass.

  “It might be someday,” Penzler said.

  Alice lifted her sister’s head clear, the rods beneath it sparking, and brought it down with a crunch on her father’s upturned face. Then she lifted it away. Penzler spat blood, one eye already swollen, and Alice smashed her dead sister down onto him again. That time Natalia’s skull broke apart and a lot of stuff like mushroom soup sloshed out onto both of them.

  “Gah!” Penzler yelled, his mouth full of shit.

  As the wheelchair rolled backwards Alice jumped barefoot onto his lap. The chair tipped and she drove his head into the stone floor as they fell, then she leapt to her feet, fists ready like her dad might leap up with a switchblade. Her breath sounded like a screen door creaking.

  Gravity pulled her father’s knees toward his face until he did a backward somersault out across the floor. He lay face down in the contents of his head.

  Alice wasn’t angry, Penzler had said, just down in the dumps.

  She lifted the rotten pumpkin that was Natalia’s head and lowered it back into its tank, threw the towel over it.

  She said, “Why couldn’t.” Then she just folded her arms.

  “Get me down, please,” I whispered.

  My tongue felt wobbly so I didn’t want to overuse it.

  She smoothed the towel down the sides of the tank, tugging either end until they were even, then ambled over with her hands in her pockets like I was her last choice for square-dance partner. Lifting a slot screwdriver from the table, she pried the belt back from my lowest band. It let go with a clang.

  “Who’s in the other room?” I whispered.

  “Dad said he’d been batting for the other team, so I guess some gay guy.”

  When the last band released I fell naked right on top of her. Got a smear of Penzler’s blood on me as I wrapped my one arm around her neck.

  Then something was different in the air, a smell or a vibration, and we both lay there blinking at each other.

  Helicopter.

  “Get the hell off,” she said into my good left shoulder.

  I rolled naked onto the stone floor. She stood up her dad’s wheelchair, set the brakes, then wrapped her arms around me like she was giving the Heimlich and dragged me up into the seat. It was still warm from Penzler’s ass.

  “I don’t have a temper like,” she said.

  She pushed me between the tables and apparatus. The incoming noise set the specimen dishes rattling.

  “They know we’re in here?” I asked.

  We rolled under the garage door into a musty hallway with straw on the floor. Another metal door stood closed right in front of us—otherwise we could turn left into what must’ve been the dark stables. Alice punched numbers on a keypad on the wall. I felt a spark shoot through my left shoulder. The door clattered up, and I got a whiff of something vinegary like hot dog relish.

  “Which way will they come in?” I asked.

  “Through the stable.” She grabbed my handles.

  Once we got past the forklift, we rolled into a lab exactly the same as the first—monitors, beakers, fish tanks, even a poor sucker strapped to the wall. His head hung forward, and at first glance I thought he had a severe birth defect, his features were sideways or something, but as we bumped over a wad of extension cords I realized the top of his head was missing. His gray brain presented itself like a jellied salad at a wedding reception. Whatever Penzler had intended, this guy was dead.

  But then he lifted his head and peered down at us. Gary the ninja.

  “You guys come to watch my dissipation,” he said.

  “He’s only been here three days.” Alice started snapping back his bands with her screwdriver. “Dad gave him too strong a dose, wanted to see how his brain would melt.”

  “Yippee,” crooned Gary.

  The sound of the helicopter was overwhelmed by a noise like a bulldozer on the other side of the wall—tanks or something.

  “You can fight them, Giller,” said Gary. “You killed every person I ever met.”

  My neck kept flexing like I was ready to head-butt the hell out of some people.

  “You killed a lot of sixteen-year-olds outside Lincoln,” I said.

  “That was maybe a mistake,” Gary murmured. “Those forensics were too much like Penzler Corporate Headquarters—made Jones bring me in for the talk, you know?”

  Something yellow and bubbly ran out of the corner of his mouth, then down the bands to Alice’s wrist and along her elbow as she pulled back the third belt from the top. He had a lot of white electrodes stapled to his chest, their wires trailing away to what looked like a chrome dishwasher. Now the tank outside was grinding its gears.

  “Any weapons here?” I whispered.

  Alice shook her head.

  “Diesel fuel?”

  “Drums in the corner,” she said.

  “Matches?”

  “In those drawers.”

  “Blasting caps.”

  “Blasting caps by the tractor. The shelf with the—”

  “Run get them, please. Oh, and fertilizer.”

  “That’s Nebraska talking. I’m taking you guys and getting out of here, that’s it.”

  “But if these guys—”

  “And there isn’t any cure,” she said. “Sorry.”

  She gave a heave on the belt under Gary’s chin and the whole band snapped, clanging back against the wall, but instead of catching the guy she turned to stare at me with her hair stuck to her shoulders by Gary’s vomit. Meantime his knees buckled under him and he slid down the wall until he was sitting on his heels. He had a purple crust around his head where Penzler had cut his skull away. Me, my gums were tingling like mad. Not good.

  “Tell the goons you’re Alice Penzler and see what happens.”

  “They’ll incapacitate me, that’s standing orders. But I’ve got a getaway car.”

  “They won’t let us drive anywhere!”

  “Okay, shit. The roof, the roof, the roof.”

  Bent low like there were snipers in the rafters, she loped out the door. Gary crouched against the wall, his bare scrotum brushing the floor. He swallowed hard—the sawdust smell coming off him was strong as varnish.

  “First Carver told me he wanted that hq blown up. I did that.” He shifted his square toes. “Then I had to collect a subject. Jones brought you in. ‘Awesome,’ I said. I got greedy, I know that, working for two bosses. But I’m getting old, man. I only have a checking account.”

  He leaned his chin on his bony knee. A shudder went through my left shoulder, then sparks ran up my ribs into that armpit—my one arm was coming off and no fleet of getaway cars could change that. My tongue turned to a square of masking tape.

  “What,” I asked slowly, “are you saving up for?”

  “Aw, nothing. No kids. That was your house in Hoover, right, on Hawthorne South? I liked that place. Was it a Coronado, that old furnace?”

  I fingered
the cauterized absence of my right shoulder, expecting cigar ash to float away. I couldn’t picture my house in Hoover, much less its basement.

  “You might as well go with her,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.” He glared at his chrome dishwasher as it churned away beside him—the goddamn thing had a little a/c adapter where it plugged into the wall. “Penzler said this’d keep me alive. Guess he filled me full of more shit than usual so he could see, really see.”

  He reached up to run an index finger across the gray coil of his brain. I retched up a mouthful of coffee. He squished the finger in up to the second knuckle.

  “Shit,” he said. “Now I feel hot all over.”

  The helicopter whupping sounded farther away. The apes were probably digging bunkers around the stables and laying in artillery because Gary and I were famous for doing backflips and ripping heads off.

  I lurched up out of the wheelchair, still stiff as rebar, did a half-spin and flopped down next to him. He had his eyes closed, his right hand still clutched protectively around that a/c cord. He shifted over to bump his left shoulder against my armless right one, then shifted away again, eyes still closed.

  “What’s your name besides Gary?”

  “It’s Chinese,” he said. “Cheuk Ho. Means ‘Honored One.’ ”

  “But who calls you Cheuk Ho?”

  “Huh. No. Nobody does.”

  He looked at me sideways. His teeth looked so pointy.

  “Guess you know what to do,” he said. “You got those kids to think about.”

  “What?”

  “Use that,” he said.

  He looked at the big slot screwdriver lying between our feet.

  “Okay,” I said, though I couldn’t have said what I was agreeing to.

  So I stared at my beautiful right toe. Why hadn’t I killed him yet? I knew what he’d done at Penzler hq and pbf. My hands weren’t exactly clean either, but I could argue that I’d only put my hand up someone’s nose when they had me against a wall. Maybe ol’ Cheuk Ho had thought his back had been against a wall too.

  “That stuff gives me the runs,” he said.

  A bag of fertilizer sat in front of us.

  “Me too. Let me ask one thing—tell me what you’d do differently, okay? Like in your whole life.”